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Bill Clinton does. So do actresses Jennifer Aniston and Gwyneth Paltrow, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, and Yankees first baseman Mark Teixeira, along with millions of hedge-fund managers, homemakers, and health nuts across the country and even around the world.

We're not talking here about that kind of juice -- steroids that boost athletic performance. We're speaking of spinach slurpies, kale cocktails, super-fruit smoothies, and all sorts of other nutrient-packed libations that have become not just drinks but an impassioned cause among a growing cadre of health-, diet-, and nutrition-obsessed consumers. Whether bought off the shelf or custom-blended in hipness-drenched juice bars, super-premium vegetable juices, in particular, are taking America's trend-setting cities and well-heeled suburbs by storm, lending new meaning to the age-old concept of a liquid lunch. In certain precincts of Manhattan and Los Angeles, almost everyone, it seems, is clutching a bottle of the brackish-looking stuff.

Juicing, as a meal replacement or mere refreshment, has become a $5 billion business, and is projected to grow by 4% to 8% a year. While juice fasts, or cleanses, have long been used to shed unwanted pounds, the latest craze is best viewed as part of a national move, especially among people in their 20s and 30s, toward healthier eating and greater consumption of raw and organic produce -- in this case, conveniently packaged and easily quaffed on the run. The habit doesn't come cheap: A 17-ounce bottle of cucumber, celery, parsley, kale, dandelion, Swiss chard, lemon, and ginger juice will set you back $13.07 at Juice Press, a raw-juice bar with four outposts in New York and a busy mail-order business. Then again, Americans spent $22 billion last year on bottles of water -- the world's most plentiful liquid, and readily available free.

David Malan/Getty Images

THE U.S. MARKET FOR FANCY JUICES is highly fragmented, encompassing both super-premium chilled products sold at retail outlets and fresh-pressed and blended concoctions available at more than 6,200 juice bars and smoothie shops nationwide. To be sure, the business in all forms is but a sliver of the total $258 billion U.S. market for nonalcoholic beverages. But it's an exciting sliver that has beverage and packaged-foods giants, food-service companies, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs seeing green.

Sales of bottled super-premium fruit and veggie juices totaled $2.25 billion last year, and are up 58% since 2004, according to Beverage Marketing, a research and consulting firm. Sales of more traditional juice products such as orange and apple juice have been flat or lower in recent years, while annual sales of carbonated soft drinks plateaued at around $71 billion in 2007, and haven't moved much since.

A juice quake could be coming to the premium-juice market now that
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(SBUX) has entered the fray, threatening to revolutionize the way America gets its greens. In November the company bought Evolution Fresh, a line of cold-pressed vegetable and fruit juices, for $30 million from Jimmy Rosenberg, founder of the Naked brand. Four months later the Seattle-based coffee giant opened its first Evolution Fresh store in nearby Bellevue, Wash., selling bottled and personalized beverages, sandwiches, soups, and salads, all with a healthful twist.

The focal point of the 1,100-square-foot store is an 11-foot-high "juice wall," with electronic art and spigots that dispense nine juice mixtures, including single-vegetable beverages, blends such as Field of Greens, and handcrafted, fruit-based smoothies. Friday, Starbucks opened its first Evolution Fresh store in downtown Seattle, and said it plans more in Seattle and San Francisco this fall.

"Our customers have been making requests for healthier food and beverages," says Jeff Hansberry, Starbucks' president of channel development and emerging brands. "Evolution Fresh is the gateway to providing customers with healthier alternatives. We've hit on a major lifestyle trend."

Last year Starbucks put the "cold-crafted" juice and smoothie market at $3.4 billion, including $1.3 billion of juices made at home. Howard Schultz, Starbucks' chairman and CEO, told analysts the company intends to reinvent the category "in the same tonality that we have reinvented, over the last 40 years, the basic commodity of coffee."

And some tone it is: Starbucks now operates more than 17,000 coffee stores in 55 countries. The company hasn't disclosed how many Evolution Fresh stores it envisions, although Schultz has mentioned "a national footprint of stores." He also plans to distribute Evolution Fresh products nationally in Starbucks stores, and capture a bigger piece of the ready-to-drink business in grocery and mass-merchandise outlets. "We are making a full court press nationally in building the brand," he told analysts.

Matthew DiFrisco, a restaurant analyst at Lazard Capital Markets, thinks the opportunity for Evolution Fresh could be somewhere between 500 and 1,000 stores nationally. Starbucks, which trades for $51.96, is on the firm's "fresh money" list, and the analyst has a price target of $69. He sees the Evolution Fresh brand as an opportunity to expand Starbucks' higher-margin consumer packaged goods and food-service business, whose sales could reach $1.3 billion in the current fiscal year, nearly double the level of four years ago.

STARBUCKS ISN'T THE ONLY JUICE COMPANY with grand ambitions. The Yankees' Teixeira was so impressed by the refreshments at Juice Press that he bought a piece of the business in February with Kenny Dichter, the founder of MarquisJets.

Dichter, who sold his fractional-jet business to
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(BRKA) in 2010, says Juice Press' stores are profitable, with annual sales approaching $10 million. He foresees a 15-store metropolitan-area chain within the next 12 months, stocked with grab-and-go products, and expects to be able to scale the business to 300 to 500 stores in North America, with an opportunity for annual sales of $500 million or more in seven to 10 years. Marcus Antebi, who founded the chain 2½ years ago, says he expects bottled green juice to become as ubiquitous someday as bottled water.

Organic Avenue is another juicery on the move. Private-equity giant KKR has invested in the eight-store Manhattan chain, in partnership with Jonathan Grayer of Weld North. "There are plenty of wealthy suburbs where Organic Avenue can thrive," says Grayer, the former head of the Kaplan education business owned by Washington Post.

Grayer, who says he sometimes drinks juice as a meal substitute, thinks Organic Avenue can triple its store count in the next few years, pushing into other markets and even the packaged-beverage channel. "We are going to try to create a habitual user," he says.

Juice Gallery's data don't include restaurant chains with fewer than 25 stores, however, so it fails to capture sales at smaller but rapidly growing raw-juiceries such as Juice Press, Organic Avenue, and Earthbar, a Los Angeles-based chain that operates 10 bars, eight of them at Equinox health clubs. Juice Generation, another eight-store New York-based start-up, also has installed bars at Equinox gyms.

Earthbar, started by Noah Bubman and his father Bernie, a pharmacist who once operated more than 200 Great Earth health-food stores, is planning to open 15 stores in Singapore and Malaysia in the next six months. Juice Generation is adding a ninth store in September. The company opened its first store, in Manhattan, in 1999.

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(JMBA) is the only publicly traded pure play in the juice-bar business, but there is nothing tasty about its shares' performance. They peaked in 2006 at $12.25 and now change hands at $2.61, endowing the Emeryville, Calif.-based company with a meager market value of $181 million. Jamba is shifting its business model to 60% franchise-owned stores from 70% company-owned outlets in order to, yes, juice results.

Jamba began life in 1990 on a California beach as Juice Club, and today operates or franchises 773 juice and smoothie shops, mostly in the U.S. In March the company, known for its fruit smoothies, announced plans to launch a new concept store focused on healthier raw juices. Fruit-laden smoothies generally pack far more sugar and calories than juices made from leafy greens.

Scott Van Winkle, an analyst at Canaccord Genuity, notes Jamba's company-owned same-store sales are expected to grow 4% to 6% this year. "You won't find a food or beverage company that isn't either doing something or thinking about doing something related to the health trend," says the analyst, who rates Jamba Juice a Buy.

Juice It Up!, an Irvine, Calif.-based smoothie chain, is doing and thinking. The company said in January that it plans to retrofit its 90 stores with raw juice bars to capture the growing demand for nutritional juices. "We have been known as a smoothie chain that sells juice; now we want to be a juice bar that sells smoothies," Carol Skinner, senior director of marketing and business development at owner Balboa Brands, told Nation's Restaurant News.

Just what are all these people drinking? Russell Simmons, co-founder of Def Jam Recordings, thinks he knows. "People are concerned about their health," he says. "Food is a drug, and green juice promotes clarity and gives you energy."

Simmons says he drinks green vegetable juices "morning, noon and night," and keeps the refrigerator in his Maybach fully stocked with his favorite verdant beverages. "Everybody around me is juicing," he adds, noting he has been able to find raw juice bars well beyond New York and L.A., in cities such as Baltimore and Detroit.

Simmons, whose Rush Communications invests in entertainment, media, fashion, and lifestyle projects, also says he has been studying the raw-juice business for six months with an eye toward a possible investment. "Just like Starbucks blew up, so could juices," he says. (For the uninformed, the Urban Dictionary defines "blow up" as a hip-hop term for "becoming famous, successful, and respected within a short period of time.")

Monika Kinsman, proprietor of Thrive Café, a raw and fresh-pressed eatery near the University district of Seattle, credits the 2010 documentary Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead for the recent surge of interest in all things juice-related. The movie chronicles the efforts of an overweight Australian filmmaker and former financier, Joe Cross, who travels across the U.S. for 60 days with a Breville juicer and a generator in tow, vowing to drink only fresh fruit and vegetable juice to lose weight and regain his health.

The story resonated with Kinsman, who opened her store in 2008, after her mother, a cancer patient, benefited from a diet of raw vegetable juices she drank at the Hippocrates Health Institute, an alternative health-care retreat in Florida. She says sales are growing by 60% a year.

Fashion designer Norma Kamali is another fresh-juice devotee. She adopted a raw and juice-based diet two years ago, and has been selling fresh-pressed juice at the Wellness Cafe in her midtown Manhattan store since 2009. "Customers love the juice," she says. "It slows down the aging process and boosts your immune system."

FRESH VEGETABLE AND FRUIT JUICE might do all this and more -- or not. The medical research is incomplete and inconclusive. Some health experts still question the role of nutrition in fighting diseases like cancer, and others worry about what's missing when produce is pulverized and reduced to its liquid essence. Robert Post, deputy director of the Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotions at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, says "there is no compelling evidence" or settled science that juicing is healthier than simply eating raw fruits and vegetables.

One concern about fresh-pressed juices, in particular, is that they aren't pasteurized. This increases the potential for contamination by pathogens, which can cause illness. Although many smaller juice bars abide by strict sanitary guidelines and label refrigerated bottles with sell-by dates, not all outlets follow these procedures. Evolution Fresh uses high-pressure processing, a nonthermal pasteurizing process that can extend the shelf life of fresh-pressed fruit and vegetable juices to about 45 days from the typical two or three for unpasteurized products. The company claims the juice loses none of its taste or enzymes and micronutrients.

Only this much is certain: Juicing is a lot better for you than eating a Big Mac and fries or Taco Bell's carne asada. "The closer you can get to a plant-based diet, the healthier it is for you," says Dr. Woodson Merrell, chairman of the Department of Integrative Medicine at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York. "Juicing is a nice way to do that."

A Matter of Taste

Just how shocking is it? Barron's ran an admittedly unscientific taste test last week, in which 17 staff members sampled an array of fresh vegetable juices, ranked them on taste and overall appeal, and supplied additional commentary about the experience. We initially had planned to do a three-day office juice cleanse, a liquid-diet regimen that supposedly goes down easier when the other folks at the water cooler are in on the plan. But common sense prevailed, given the unknown effects of solid-food deprivation on magazine production.

Barron's staffers sampled green-vegetable combinations from Jamba Juice, Juice Generation, Naked Juice, Organic Avenue, and the Juice Press. Not surprisingly, the sweeter smoothie products -- Green Machine from Naked and Apple 'n Greens from Jamba, which doesn't have a pure vegetable potion -- won hands down in the taste department.

Of the three raw juices from local boutiques, our taste panel favored Doctor Green from the Juice Press -- a mixture of pineapple, apple, lemon, ginger, and kale. One quaffer said the Green LOVE juice (the love stands for "live organic vegan experience") from Organic Avenue had "an unapologetic vegetable taste," but it wasn't clear whether that was a compliment or a critique. Another said Green LOVE had a "refreshing, healthy taste without provoking the gag reflex" -- high praise, indeed.

Juice Generation's Sweet Greens mixture of kale, spinach, parsley, watercress, and apple had no big fans. Said one sipper: "This must be what kissing a cow tastes like."

Some folks go bananas over vegetable juice, but many who try it agree it's an acquired taste. "Your taste buds adapt," says the designer Norma Kamali, a green-juice devotee. "Most people absorb the shock of a new taste called real food."